Rooting my NAS

I purchased a Buffalo Linkstation Live NAS. It was at first a nice toy. Then I figured it was running Linux. The adventure begins.

Little search at Google showed that it's possible to gain telnet and root access to the box. I was totally excited to get the root shell prompt on my terminal. This seems to be too good to be true, but suprisingly it was. I was able to get uname and statistics via procfs. Setuped the SSH and was able to login to the box.

Next I installed ipkg system on it using these instructions. I was able to install packages! Installed screen and irssi and in several minutes I was using IRC on the box.

There's a lot of packages available to the device and just can't even imagine what to do next. I have a NAS box, which can be extended to a real server with any applications I want to run. It has a quite a big amount of disc space (500 GB), and it didn't even cost a much. I'm impressed. For people looking a quiet, small and handy server, I can recommend purchasing one of these. I will continue playing with this and will report if there will be some more findings.

FOSDEM 2008

So the FOSDEM 2008 is now over. Writing down some experiences about it. First of all, there seemed to be a lot of people in there. Their broschyr said there will be 4000+ geeks at the place. But nobody was counting, so the number is just an estimation. However the place was crowded, some lectures was too full, people was just standing like sardines in can. There was space in some places too, but the most popular events was just nightmare.


Janson lecture room

Picked some interesting lectures, such as Clutter, integrating the Web into GTK+ with WebKit, Mozilla Mobile, tangoGPS lighting talk, among other full lectures and lightning talks (15 minutes time limit) which I was watching.

Also spent some time watching the stands. There was many Asus Eee PC's and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) computers, as well as different embedded devices running free software, for example OpenEmbedded stand was interesting.


Eee PC


OLPC

It was not only strict business but also fun time, spending nice time at Friday Beer Event at Delirium cafe and GNOME Beer Party on Saturday. Had a change to talk to people in a relaxed environment. Somebody said that the real conference starts when people gets some beer.

But after all met some good people and changed thoughts, talked about different open source related stuff. And I was able to show my demo with FIC Neo1973. The demo itself was not impressive, it was just a Debian etch booting with working X, touch screen and Matchbox window manager. But what makes it great, is the time spent on that: only a single day. I'd probably talk more closely about it and about the progress in this blog.

But I was nice to be there! Thanks to the organizers, all speakers and people I met.

Going to Fosdem 2008

As said I will be at FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium. I'm going there with a co-worker, and our employer, Nomovok, is kindly paying the trip.

I'm quite excited to see other people working on open source projects and talk to them about all kind of open source related things. If you're going to FOSDEM as well and are intrested to talk with me, please contact me beforehand with a email (you're able to see the email in my profile) and let see if we can arrange a meeting.

I probably have my FIC Neo1973 with me so that I can show it for curious people. Also my Nokia N800 will be there. I can also tell about some personal intrests of mine in area of open source. So don't hesitate to contact me. See you at the FOSDEM.